As I was saying yesterday, pricing is an important marketing tool. Price-cutting, if not handled carefully, can seriously affect our customers’ concept of the value of our products.
Take theatre tickets. A £50 price tag tells our audience that this is a large scale West End musical. £20 says it’s a mid-scale play in a local venue. The price doesn’t guarantee that you’ll like the show but it indicates the production values. There is no point in selling a top West End musical at less than £50 because customers will think it must have cheap sets and three people in the chorus.
So, when the National Theatre sells seats for £10 that would normally cost £35 or more, potentially this undermines theatre audiences’ expectations. Not about the NT of course, because their audience know their reputation and that they have a subsidy, both of which guarantee something more substantial than the typical small-scale arts centre product normally available at that price. The problem is that people who have heard about the £10 tickets may no longer be sure whether they are being ripped off by the usual price at other theatres or whether other low priced tickets might also actually be high value productions.
The NT have a sponsorship deal which can be used to explain the low price without undermining the value of the tickets but they made too little of this and too much of the way £10 tickets would fill empty seats, implying those seats were currently overpriced.
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